


until tonight I only dreamed about you

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-12
Updated: 2015-06-12
Packaged: 2018-04-04 00:35:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4120101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What brings you here?”</p><p>He opens his arms, looks around like it should be obvious. “I’m busting you out.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	until tonight I only dreamed about you

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from Kelly Clarkson's "Heartbeat Song."

Jemma doesn’t bother to look up from her work to say, “You’re late.” She hopes her tone is enough to convey just how displeased she is by this imposition into her schedule. She is _busy_ , which she wouldn’t have been an hour and a half ago when her dinner was due to arrive.

“Am I?” a slightly laughing voice asks. The beaker Jemma’s holding nearly slips right out of her hand, but she manages to catch it before she ends up with a serious problem. (It is hell getting accidents cleaned up down here.) With shaking fingers, she places the beaker into its assigned slot and turns to face the agent she is certain will not be Grant Ward.

It is.

Large as life and smiling at her from the other side of the invisible barrier that allows her visitors. Not that she has any, but the agents who deliver her food and clothing and supplies need to be kept safe.

She grips the table behind her and takes him in slowly. Upon first hearing his voice, she feared that she was hallucinating. She has, embarrassingly, been dreaming of him quite frequently over the last few months. It’s to be expected. His was the last friendly face she saw before being relocated and he had just saved her life in a terribly heroic fashion. A little crush is perfectly reasonable under the circumstances. But a hallucination is decidedly _not_.

She refuses to be driven mad by her circumstances, and is relieved to find him quite real. The expression he wears is not one she ever saw on his face in their few weeks together on the Bus. If her subconscious were to draw up a facsimile of him, she would expect it to have the smile he was only just beginning to let show on game nights, not this impossible to decipher little smirk he has on now.

“Ward,” she says, her voice just as shaky as the feet that carry her closer to the barrier. She has no idea what to do with her hands. “What brings you here?”

The smirk grows. “Oh, you know, thought I’d take in some of the sights.” He turns to the blank stretch of wall on his right as if observing the view from a window. He only holds the posture a moment before smiling in her direction, inviting her to share in the joke. He’s _teasing_ her. (Maybe he _is_ a hallucination.) “Come on, Simmons,” he says a touch more gently. It reminds her of the ocean, the way he held her to him as they bobbed on the waves, brushed her hair from her brow and made her look at him to be sure she wasn’t drifting off. “I’m here for _you_.”

Her hand fists in midair, caught halfway to her temple. “What do you mean?” she asks, backing up a step.

He opens his arms, looks around like it should be obvious. “I’m busting you out.”

Equipment rattles as Jemma bumps into her lab table. She shakes her head. “No. No, you can’t.”

“What happened to you?” Ward asks, head tilted to one side. “What happened to the woman who was so excited for her ‘journey into mystery’?” He tries to make it a joke, a silly little reminder of their first meeting. It brings tears to her eyes.

She wonders what happened to _him_. The man she knew on the Bus didn’t have this sharp edge, he wasn’t cruel for the joy of it.

“You know!” she finds herself yelling. “You know exactly what happened! How dare you come down here just to play games with me!” She whirls, turning her back on him and this time gripping the table’s edge for a far different reason.

It would have been better if Ward stayed away, instead of coming to mock and hurt her. She dreamed, in those first weeks, of visitors. Of Fitz or Skye or, yes, even Ward coming to make her confinement more bearable. But no one ever did, and she slowly learned to accept her new reality. She saved her own life, stopped the Chitauri virus in its tracks, but it's not gone. She glances to the open door to her tiny bedroom. Its walls are reinforced against the destructive pulse she still lets out every thirty-eight hours. And that is the least of the reasons she can't leave this place.

Tears strike the cold surface of the table. Why won’t he just _leave_ already?

“Hey, hey.” His voice is soft, soothing, as are the hands he lays on her shoulders.

She jolts away, darting to one side, but doesn’t make it far. Ward is far faster than her, and manages to catch her wrists.

She sobs. “No. Nononono.” He’s been cruel to her, but that doesn’t mean she wants him to _die_. She's terribly contagious, more than she was on the Bus. Any skin-to-skin contact with another living being unerringly transmits the virus. Why wasn't he  _warned_?

“Simmons!” he barks, and pulls her to his chest, trapping her in the circle of his arms.

She’s shaking, trying her hardest to pull back, but he’s so strong. He gives her one, firm jolt, lifting her right off her feet to shake her.

“ _Simmons_ ,” he says again. “Do you really think I’d walk in here if I thought you could hurt me?”

She can’t move - she’s too afraid to - and so doesn’t stop him when he reaches slowly to brush her hair back over her ear. His fingertips linger against her skin and she feels only the warmth of them. The small bolt of electricity she usually feels when she dooms someone - it doesn’t happen at all. Ward’s mouth curves into a smile, this one far more like those he wore on game nights.

“See?” he asks.

No, she wants to say, she doesn’t see, she _feels_. She feels his fingers still lingering in her hair and his arm around her waist and the warmth of his body against hers. It has been _months_ since she last touched another human being.

She’s crying again, happy tears this time, and Ward pulls her into his chest. He strokes her hair and lets her release eight months’ worth of pent up emotion into his shirt.

“You’re not cured,” he says before she can get too far along.

She nods against his shoulder. “The antiserum?”

“Yep." He sounds proud that she's figured it out. "Our scientists think it probably jumped from you to me, like an electrical current, and since I was exposed to it before the pulse from the virus…”

“You’re immune.” She presses her palms to his chest, forcing a little distance. Not that she _wants_ distance. She’d be perfectly happy staying in his arms for a year, but there’s so much to consider now. “I’ll need samples,” she says. “Of- well, of everything, I’m afraid.”

She’ll have to set aside her more recent projects. They really could have warned her that there was a breakthrough with the virus. She was so close to fixing the problem with that immune booster they gave her the other day.

“Sure,” Ward says, catching her hand before she can go too far. “Just as soon as we get someplace safe.”

Jemma pauses, looking slowly from him to the edges of her very secure cell. They’re in one of the lowest levels of the Fridge, what could be more secure than this?

“I’m breaking you out,” Ward says again.

She notices for the first time that he’s armed, a gun strapped to his thigh and the edge of a knife at the top of his boot. He’s also looking the worse for wear, like he’s been in a very bad fight recently.

Her hand stops just before touching his face, the learned instinct to stay away overriding her desire to see to his injuries. He leans his cheek against her fingers.

“Aren’t you wondering why I wasn’t here sooner?” he asks. “I’ve been immune this whole time and SHIELD never sent me to you, never even told you.”

She tries to tug her hand back, but he catches it, holding it to his cheek. “They must not have realized,” she says. “I certainly didn’t, even when they finally told me you were alive.” She spent weeks thinking she’d killed him, and even now, months after someone finally told her he’d survived, the nightmares from those early days still linger.

Ward scoffs, finally letting her go so he can back away. He looks over her cell with disgust, his eyes traveling slowly from the small lab to the bedroom.

“You know they never told us?” he says finally. “Where you were. They told me they were taking you back to England to spend your leave with your _parents_.”

She shudders at the thought. “They got word to us mid-flight,” she says, trying and failing to keep at bay the image of her parents’ floating corpses. If someone at the Morocco base hadn’t taken another look at her tissue samples, she would be responsible for her parents’ deaths, as well as those of countless civilians.

Ward barks out a laugh. “Is that what they told you? There was never any team headed to London. You weren’t just catching a lucky ride. They were always bringing you here. And they hid it from the rest of us because they knew we’d never-” He taps the side of his fist on the tabletop and leans against it, staring out at the space past the downed barrier. He looks angry, furious.

She understands. She still feels that way sometimes herself, but this is for the best. She’s a danger to anyone who gets near her.

Anyone but Ward.

“They never even tried to find a cure,” he says softly.

She smiles at that, tilting her head to catch his attention. She gestures to the lab. “What do you think I’ve been doing the last few months?”

His smile is sad. “How much of that time did you spend working on projects SHIELD sent you? Just other things to think about, get your mind off the real problem in hopes of having a eureka moment?”

His words are so close to those of the base commander, the first time she asked Jemma to try working on something else, that she cringes back. Ward catches her shoulder, the fact of his touch holding her in place more effectively than his strong grip.

“SHIELD wasn’t holding you here under quarantine to protect everyone else. This was about _you_. They saw an opportunity to keep one of their brightest minds out of the field - to practically chain you to a lab bench - and they took it.”

Much as she’d like to believe the venom in his voice is all for her, she doesn’t think that’s quite the case. She steps forward, thrilling a little at the simple freedom to lay her hand on another human being’s arm.

“Ward. What’s going on?”

He runs a hand over his face. “That’s a long story.”

She shrugs. “Your prison break doesn’t seem to be on a time limit.” It’s true. She would have expected him to be rushing her to safety, but he seems wholly unconcerned that they might be interrupted. She thinks of her late dinner.

“You might wanna sit down,” he says.

It’s rude of her to take the only stool in the lab when he’s her guest, but he did say to sit, so she does.

“SHIELD’s done," he says without preamble. "Finished. There’s this other organization, one that’s been hidden inside SHIELD almost from the start. They’ve - _we’ve_ \- been trying for ages to stop SHIELD from doing … well, from doing things like this.” He gestures around the cell. “And a few days ago, we stopped trying. We took SHIELD down.”

Some of what she’s feeling must show on her face, because he moves forward to grasp her hands.

“I know it sounds crazy,” he says. “But look around. Look at what they did to you. You think you’re the only person SHIELD just tossed in the Fridge like garbage?”

She wants to tell him he’s wrong, to deny everything he’s saying, but if a year ago, someone had told her about an agent in her current position, she never would have believed them. It’s absurd to think SHIELD would hold someone like this. Or it would’ve been.

And then there’s Fitz. She’s spent months quietly accepting the excuses for why she hasn’t heard from him, why she can’t contact him directly. But what if all of those were actually lies meant to keep her in line?

She would love to think on it further, to weigh the possibilities, but her concentration is suffering from the distracting way Ward’s been running his thumbs over her knuckles. “Let me get you out of here,” he says. “We’ve got a secure base in Cuba, never held by SHIELD. It’s got a room that can hold the pulse, so you’ll be safe, and you’ll have everything you need to find a cure.”

His hand moves up her arm, under the sleeve of her lab coat. The contact almost has her whimpering. A little more of that and he could have her weaponizing the virus without the slightest argument.

“Jemma?” he presses gently. “Are you ready to get out of here?”

Back out into the world, back to searching for a cure. She’ll see the sky again.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, please.” There are tears in her eyes again (this isolation has certainly made her weepy) but she pushes them down.

He smiles, and the sharpness in it doesn’t seem so alien anymore. She can’t imagine what it must have been like for him, fighting from within against people he should have been able to trust. If she were in his shoes, she’d likely have a bit of dark humor about it all as well.

They go slow, with him holding her arm gently and allowing her to set the pace. She’s afraid again for a brief moment that this really has all been a hallucination and that the barrier will repel her, but she passes easily over the line. After that she’s almost _too_ eager. He reminds her that she’s been cooped up for months, and likely doesn’t have the energy she used to. And, more hesitantly, reminds her that SHIELD has fallen and what’s waiting outside isn’t anything she wants to go running into.

She clamps her mouth shut on the impulse to tell him he did what he had to. She didn’t know him well enough before to know whether he’d welcome that sort of comfort so soon, and she certainly doesn’t know him well enough now.

He’s got a tac vest waiting at the top of the stairs, and slips it on while she hides her grin. With all the danger outside, he chose to take it off, to look less imposing, when he confronted her. She appreciates the gesture more than she can say.

She sticks close, practically clinging to him whenever he leaves her behind to check a hallway. Once, he orders her to close her eyes and, rather than argue that she’s not some wilting flower, she obeys, keeping them tightly shut until they’ve turned the next corner.

Heavily armored men salute him as they pass at a safe distance, and one directs them to a waiting quinjet. “It’ll get us to Cuba before your next pulse,” Ward says, buckling her into the seat beside him, “don’t you worry.” She hadn’t, actually. Ward and his people seem to have everything well in-hand.

“What about the others?” she asks.

He grins. “You mean Fitz?”

She meets his eyes defiantly. She will not be ashamed of worrying for her best friend.

“Don’t worry. I’m working on tracking them down.” His hand, which has been a comforting weight on her thigh, slips lower. He promptly lifts it up with a hiss. “Jeez. Sorry. That was- I am a very bad man.” He fists his hands on his knees and lets his head tip back a moment before looking her way from the corner of his eye. “I’m glad you’re okay, Simmons. I can’t tell you how much.”

Perhaps he means it in a strictly platonic way. Perhaps her months of isolation and fruitless infatuation have muddled what little sixth sense she had about these things. Still, she’s fresh out of her cell and life seems full of possibilities. She takes his hand and laces their fingers together in her lap.

“I’m glad you’re okay too. And I don’t think I’ll ever be able to thank you enough.”

They share a smile, one that makes her think, maybe… Only it’s ruined when the jet begins taxiing towards the hangar doors and she jumps in her seat.

He replaces one hand with the other so that he can slip his arm around her shoulders. “Don’t worry,” he says into her ear, sending a pleasant jolt that has nothing to do with her condition down her spine. “I’m right here with you.”

She smiles as she presses herself more comfortably into his side. She can’t imagine anywhere else feeling safer.


End file.
